MALIGNED

The Book

Excerpt

Trivia

EXCERPT

1906

“We do comparatively very little business in cities, and we assume the cities are not at all out field – maybe they are not – but I think it is our duty to prove they are not.”

Richard Warren Sears

Mary Mallon sat on the nicest toilet she’d ever been compelled to sit on, reading through the brand new Fall Sears Roebuck catalogue. The catalogue was a habit she couldn’t break herself of, even after Mr. Warren, her employer, had shown her the toilet paper that his family had recently begun to use in the bathroom.

The toilet paper seemed strange to her – a roll of paper, which served no other purpose than to wipe with. It definitely lacked for efficiency, reminding her once again of the strange and exotic things rich people tended to buy – what was wrong with the Sears Roebuck catalogue? True, the color pages were a little rougher than the old black and white, but she had gotten used to it.

Reading through the catalogue was a catharsis for Mary. She couldn’t make an effective bowel movement without at least once reading through the cosmetics section. If she was still blocked up after that, then she went through the pages of clothes, even though her sartorial tastes were nothing fancy, and finally through the kitchen utensils, the pots, the pans, worked out of aluminum and iron and brass in the most cunning fashion. This last perusal was out of professional interest, since she herself was a cook by trade.

The morning light was streaming through the open window, and she could smell the salt on the breeze. As much as she moved around, she was never far from the coast. She had turned down many a family, simply because they were too far inland. The ocean reminded her of the home she was forced to leave in Dublin, at such a young age.

Noises of her employer’s family waking up broke her from her reverie. Mr. Warren’s room was directly above the bathroom, and he was the kind of portly man that couldn’t move silently through a wooden house, especially from his bed to the floor. The delicate sounds of Mrs. Warren waking up were no longer to be heard, since she had been bedridden for a few days, along with the Warren daughter – it was time for Mary to wrap up her time in the bathroom. If breakfast wasn’t ready by the time Mr. Warren was down the staircase, he wouldn’t hesitate to express his dissatisfaction, as she well knew. The man took his meals seriously, with an almost religious demeanor. And she, as the priest, couldn’t show up late to the sermon, with only half-baked flesh of Christ.

She took a handful of the unnecessary toilet paper, and tried a tentative wipe, just to humor Mr. Warren. The paper crumbled to nothing in her hand. “No substance,” she complained aloud. Discreetly, she took a page out of the Sears’ automobile section, which didn’t interest her much, and finished the job. The soiled page went to the small trash bin at the toilet’s side, the failed toilet paper went into the toilet bowel (it seemed wrong to her – she knew how fickle indoor plumbing was, through her experience trying to flush food waste down a sink, but Mr. Warren said it was alright), and she gave it a good flush. Then she took her apron from the door, where it hung waiting, put it on, and wiped her hands quickly along one of its bottom corners. “Breakfast,” she said.

The kitchen was a sprawling affair, with enough preparation space to host a banquet. And Mary used it all, since the house that Mr. Warren had rented for the summer contained an entire retinue of people, ten adults and two children. Eight of those adults were house aids, and the children were naturally the Warren’s, a daughter and a son, both nearly grown. She prepared a special meal for the Warrens, who normally broke their fast in the quaint dining room – although recently it was just Mr. Warren and the son that ate there – and she prepared a common meal for everyone else.

With deft hands she sliced a dozen tomatoes, arraying them on plates. She then made some of her special cream toast, in the middle of which she began to brew some of the coffee that Mr. Warren couldn’t live without. Mr. Warren himself had come to inspect her activity in the kitchen, just in time to see her pull out the chicken that had been in the oven for over an hour.

“Nearly ready, Mr. Warren.”

“I’ll be reading the paper,” he replied.

Mr. Warren was a prosperous banker, who was on an extended vacation as his home was renovated in New York City. The vacation took a turn for the worse when half of the house came down with a fever, but it would only be another few days before the Warren’s would be moving back home, taking their maids with them. Mary would part ways, and take up working for another family in Manhattan, an arrangement she had made a month prior.

As befitting his profession, Mr. Warren would read through all of the business articles of the New York Times, after he milled about for a little bit on the front page, getting a vague sense of the world. But it never held him for long – only the stock market could do that, and occasionally sports. His deeply engrained competitive nature gave him a predilection for sports.

When Mary brought Mr. Warren his coffee, before she could go back to finish preparing the breakfast, he told her, “This says that you can throw the ball forward in football now.”

It was tacitly understood by the two, from the short time that they had gotten to know each other, that Mary didn’t care one bit for the business world. She would only respond to his corporate enthusiasm with blank stares, a habit that Mr. Warren was too talkative to endure. As a compromise, he would throw headlines at her that he thought might catch her interest – Mary herself didn’t read much.

“Why on earth would they do that?” Mary didn’t know much about football, other than that it was something that college boys played, and was popular in the area.

“I have no idea. I didn’t read it.”

“Well, I’ll keep it in mind,” she replied with a smile.

She made a few steps to return to her work, when he called after her. “Oh, and Mary?”

“Yes?”

“I saw the Sears catalogue lying in the bathroom. I’ve told you, haven’t I? that there are plenty of quality stores in the area? Nice people helping you out, you can see exactly what it is you’re buying, and you don’t have to wait for it to come in the mail. And good deals. I should know, I work for some of these stores. That catalogue is so… rural. It’s for those damn uncivilized westerners, out in the middle of nowhere.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Mr. Warren.” And she continued on her way.

The servants would take their breakfast in the kitchen, standing around the expansive island, which could have fairly been called a continent. She had prepared just enough plates for the whole staff, but three were unaccounted for.

“Molly is still laid up?” she asked no one in particular. “Derek too? And where’s Molly?”

“They’re getting worse before they’re getting better,” one of the maids replied. “Derek’s got a horrendous fever, and Molly hasn’t moved for days. She just asks for water every now and then, and she don’t say or do nothing else. And Molly’s saying she must have what everyone else has, she’s too sick for work, she says.”

As a cook, Mary had to insist on the power of food. “You can’t live on just water. You tell Molly that she’s got to eat. I’ve been sending food to her every meal, didn’t Molly give it to her?” Molly was young and compliant, so all of the other servants would have her run the less glamorous errands, which had included delivering food to all the sick people. With her out of commission, one of them would have to take up the slack.

“Molly took her your food, sure enough, but Molly wouldn’t eat any of it. They’ve just been tossing it out.”

Mary’s temper flared quickly, and for no reason she could explain. “Why wasn’t I told about this?” she yelled, her arms at her sides, chest puffed out, towering over the petite maid.

“I… we didn’t think it concerned you, really.”

“Someone in this house isn’t eating, and you think it doesn’t concern me? That’s what I get paid for, people eating.”

“Yes, but if she can’t eat – ”

Mary interrupted her. “No one can’t eat. Not if they’ve got a mouth and a stomach. I’ll take it to her myself.”

Always robust in health, Mary lacked the bodily fear that kept the remaining maid, Renny, away from the quarantine zone upstairs. Molly had been afraid as well, but had been intimidated by Renny into taking care of the sick people. In her haste to deliver the food to Molly, Mary quite forgot to deliver Mr. Warren his own meal.

Three plates in hand, Mary burst into the room that housed the three sick servants. A gardener and two maids. Molly had already made the transition from her room on the west side of the upper floor to the quarantined east side.

When Mary opened the door, there was a miasma of disease that greeted her. The acrid smell of sweat and feces, left to ferment in a room without proper ventilation. The window was open, Mary noted, but the breeze didn’t seem to reach that side of the building. Quickly depositing the two plates for Derek and Penny, she shifted her entire focus to Molly.

“I’ve heard enough about you not eating. You’re going to keep on being sick, unless you fill your stomach up regularly.” She put the plate directly on Molly’s stomach.

Molly had been much prettier at the start of their summer retreat. Blond flowing hair, fair-skinned, and a pleasant plumpness that rounded out her almost picturesque maidenhood. But that Molly had withered away almost to nothing. Her face became gaunt, her cheekbones now seemed overly assertive, her complexion had gone all red, and her blonde hair was matted with sweat, all in knots. Mary drew on these observations to prove her point. “You don’t eat, and look what happens. You dry up. Are you even listening?”

She waved her hand in front of Molly’s face, but it elicited no response. Her eyes didn’t follow the movement, just stared into some void. In what was perhaps a moment of indiscretion, Mary slapped Molly in her blotchy face, to what avail she herself didn’t know. But the maid’s trance wasn’t broken. Mary was very nearly on the verge of force feeding the limp body some cream toast when a doctor stepped into the room.

The cream toast was already in Mary’s left hand, and her right gripping Molly’s tiny jaw, so there was nothing Mary could do to act inconspicuous. Still she returned the toast to the plate, and closed Molly’s jaw back up for her – all the while the doctor inspecting her with a slow scrutiny.

Finally, he said, “What exactly is it you’re doing? Are you the caretaker?”

“I’m the cook,” she replied, since she figured there was some sort of distinction between those two titles. “I’m making sure she eats.”

The doctor inspected the toast. “In her condition, a soup would be much more appropriate,” was his medical opinion.

“I didn’t make soup,” she snapped back.

The doctor was slowly becoming more agitated, in the face of Mary’s impudence. “Well maybe you should have, then. It’s really as simple as that.”

Mary argued, “A soup doesn’t have any substance to it. It’s like water. She needs meat, and bread, otherwise she’s just going to be sick some more.”

“You’re lecturing me on what she needs, to not be sick, is that how it is? You’re awful brazen, to be standing in a room full of sick people, prying people’s mouth open, trying to prove some theory about nutrition of yours. If you’ll excuse me madam, but you are in the way of an actual doctor.”

She wasn’t going to back down so easily. “I never get sick, doctor. Even when I’m surrounded by all these sick people. And I’ve been around a lot of sick people, doctor. And do you know how I do it? I eat at least one good hearty meal, every day. If you were really a doctor, you should know that.”

“The reason you aren’t getting sick from these people is because this particular disease isn’t contagious in the same way that most diseases are. Now, mam, I don’t make vacuous threats – if you don’t leave in an instant, I’ll have a few things to tell your employer about your behavior…”

Mary would have continued to maintain her position, if the circumstances were in any wise different, but threats to her employment she always took seriously, even though she was almost to the end of her current arrangement. She had yet to receive that final paycheck. If she met this doctor again, after the money was transferred, she would pick up right where she left off. But for the moment she left him to his sickly charges.

When she returned down the stairs, she expected to find an irate Mr. Warren, since she had finally remembered that she never delivered him his food. Instead she found him talking to an older man she had never met before, as they sat in the parlor that was removed from the dining room by a decorative set of French doors. She eavesdropped from a corner, where she knew she wouldn’t be seen.

The old man was saying, “But I really do regret these circumstances, Mr. Warren. When I rent a house out, and I do it all the time, I’m making a guarantee. A guarantee that you’ll be comfortable, provided for, in a word content. Now when half of your family falls sick, I’ve failed in that guarantee.”

“But it could have been anything, Mr. Thompson.” Mr. Thompson said, in the monotonous voice he had. “My daughter could have caught it from some urchin on the beach. And then she brings it back to us, and you know the rest of the story.”

“Mr. Warren, you’re ignoring certain facts, and not letting me take the proper blame. This disease isn’t a rich person’s disease. It is very specifically a poor person’s disease. And there are absolutely no poor people in Oyster Bay, that’s why people like coming here. I’ve talked to the doctors that have seen your family, and they are unanimous on how out of place this disease is, whatever it’s called. Some sort of salmonella.

“Furthermore, these outbreaks are supposed to be epidemics, and yet your household is the only one that’s got it. That’s endemic, that’s the wrong demic. So it leads us to conclude there must be something wrong with the house. Contaminated water, rotten shellfish. Have you been eating a lot of shellfish? That’s a stupid question, this is Oyster Bay. I’m hiring people, and they’re going to investigate everything. There might be a hole in the piping, and salmonella is leaching in. I don’t want to alarm you, saying horrible things like that, but we’re past a point where I should be sugar-coating the truth. And these investigators will check out the food, too.”

“I’ll pay for the investigators, naturally,” Mr. Warren suggested.

“You’re a banker? How is it you claim know anything about saving money, when you go around proposing horrible ideas like that? I’m the one that provided you all your raw foodstuffs, the burden falls on me, and that’s final. The paperwork’s already been done, the payments made. The only thing that’s wanting is for your vacation to be over, since I wouldn’t want to disturb your family any more than they’ve already been disturbed. On that note, I’m surprised you’re still here.”

“The damage is already done. The doctor seems to think my wife and daughter will make a full recovery, and all that’s left to do is wait. It doesn’t seem to matter much if the waiting is done here or somewhere else, and the builders are still working on my house, so that pretty much settles it.”

“Those ‘workers’ are really stretching it to the deadline, aren’t they? The damned proletariats.” It was a truism shared between two men, both of whom had really made it as far as being rich was concerned, and they both took a moment to nod their heads knowingly. Mary had to peak around the corner to see.

“If I gave them another week, suddenly that would be exactly as much time as they needed to get it done,” Mr. Warren agreed. “I should have known not to pay them by the hour. Even with my brother supervising them whenever he’s got the chance, they seem to have no trouble pulling the wool over his eyes.”

“Hopefully it’s not as bad as that,” Mr. Thompson said. But there was doubt in his voice.

“That’s really neither here nor there, though,” Mr. Warren said.

“I suppose you’re right. But I have nothing to add to the original topic. I suppose I’ll leave you now, and hope that you can forgive my intrusion. And, more importantly, I hope you can forgive this house. If we ever do business together again, I promise it won’t turn out this way a second time.”

“It’s nothing,” Mr. Warren said, and sounded dully sincere, but also resigned.

The men had stood up and would be moving through the dining room again, so Mary retreated to the kitchen. Still, she could hear Mr. Thompson say, “Just looking at the house, you wouldn’t think it was capable of such a cruel act. It’s beyond sense. Look at that woodworking! Full of bacteria? Not possible. The quality is too high, the wood is too pure. And this veranda,” he said, as the front door was opened. “No bad thing has ever happened on a veranda this beautiful. A law of nature. It’s only the purest of evil, that could somehow traverse so much goodness. But I suppose I’m just repeating myself. Good day, Mr. Warren.”

The conversations she had overheard, and her interaction with the doctor, seemed to suggest that to Mary that she had a lot to think about, but she didn’t very well know how to go about that. After she sent Renny off with the Warrens’ breakfast, since she was already in the kitchen, she started going about preparing for lunch. Even though breakfast was just served, lunch would be due in just a few hours. Cooking replaced thought, and more than sufficiently. As a cook for so many people, and especially people like Mr. Warren, with huge appetites, her job was never really at an end. No sooner had she fed the man, then he relieved himself on the fanciest of toilets, and was ready to replace what was lost.

It only occurred to her in passing that the water she added to the flour, and the flour itself, was supposedly contaminated. Mr. Thompson had said something to that effect, she thought. But it didn’t make much difference to her. The water looked just fine, the flour looked exactly like good flour always did. She was halfway to preparing some Vienna rolls when she noticed that she was joined by yet another stranger in the kitchen. The house was a veritable highway that day, it seemed.

“May I direct you somewhere?” she asked, her eyes never leaving her work.

“I’ve come to talk to you, as it turns out,” the man said. “Mary? Mary Mallon?”

He had her attention. She turned to find a young man, dressed in what seemed to her to be a uniform, although it wasn’t the uniform of any denomination that she knew of. His hair was combed back slickly, his black boots shined with an unusual luster.

“That’s me, yes. But I don’t know you,” she said.

“And you won’t, until I introduce myself. The name is Richard Sears Junior, although you can just call me Junior, if it isn’t too much to ask. Richard is my father, and so is Mr. Sears. And I’m afraid a simple Dick wouldn’t work either.”

Since he offered a hand, she shook it, although the gesture was unusual to her. “And why are you here?” she asked.

“You cut straight to the heart of the matter, I see. And you’re busy, so I won’t take up too much of your time. But there are important things that I feel compelled to bring up.” With these words and great import of gesture, he placed a magazine on the counter adjacent to Mary. She realized it to be the new Fall Sears catalogue, but not just that – it was her new Fall Sears catalogue, the one that she had left in the bathroom not an hour before.

“Where did you get a hold of that?” she demanded, possessively wrenching it away from him, although he wasn’t holding it.

“I’m going to ask a more important question, and then I’m going to answer it, and it will make our conversation much more productive. Sound good?” She was too dumbfounded to respond, so he was allowed to continue unimpeded. “Do you think you can effectively live your life, when you rip the pages out of it with reckless abandon?” He took the catalogue from her hands, and since her former vehemence had abruptly evaporated, she didn’t resist. He flipped to the automobile section, which was conspicuously missing pages. “These missing pages, they represented your childhood. And what now? You flushed it down the drain? Is that what you do to all of your most cherished memories?”

“I don’t have need for cars,” she managed to say.

“You say that now,” he rebutted quickly, “but soon, very soon, you’ll realize that you’ve always wanted one. They represent freedom, they represent the power one has over one’s fate and location. They are an economic statement, showing the world that you are a person of property. These things, these things you can’t discard.”

“I simply can’t afford a car,” she said, trying another argument.

“Fortunately, I didn’t come to sell you one. I came to give you this.” From a leather bag that she hadn’t noticed he was carrying, he pulled out an identical copy to her catalogue. Only this one, he assured her, was complete. “If you really must, you can go on tearing pages out of your old one, but I would advise you to break the habit as soon as you can. And this new one that I’m giving you, you can’t ever tarnish. Understood?”

She didn’t answer, but he seemed satisfied anyway. He took a moment to inspect her workspace, nodding slowly as he took everything in. After a couple seconds of that, he said, “While I have you here, though, you simply must turn to page three forty-five.”

He waited patiently while she complied. When she finally managed to find the page, she said, “I’ve looked through this already. The kitchen utensils. Don’t think I haven’t seen it.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ve seen it,” he said. “Or at least I believe you when you say you have. But have you thought about it. Take this tomato slicer for instance.” He pointed at the page, at some stainless steel instrument, all the while staring deep into Mary’s eyes, as if carefully gauging her reaction. “Now I know you slice a lot of tomatoes. Just this morning, am I right? I see it in your eyes. And how much time did you spend doing it?”

“Oh, not very long,” she said.

“Right, very right, not very long. But it did take a finite amount of time. Let’s say it only took you five minutes to chop up a dozen tomatoes, nothing to worry about, right? But you’ll be doing the same thing tomorrow. It might not be a tomato per se, but it will certainly be shaped like one, and you’ll have to chop it. And the next day, and the day after that. So it’s only five minutes today, but over the course of your lifetime it’s weeks, months even. And very soon it’s depressing to think about, how much time you spend chopping objects shaped like a tomato. Cooking’s not about time spent manipulating food, am I right? It’s about the finished product, the smiling faces, the full stomachs.”

His gaze intensified, travelled deeper into her own eyes. “It’s about keeping people healthy. So if you can reduce the time you spend from five minutes to three, nothing is lost. Only gained. Months of your life, that you can spend doing other things. You’re more productive, you’re a hot commodity, and suddenly you can afford that car from the pages of a catalogue that your former self would have torn out.

“Not only that, not only that, but with this tomato slicer, every slice is identical. The variation, the human error is gone. You’re an excellent cook, I can see it in your demeanor, but even you can’t perfectly replicate every knife cut that you make. Your hypothetical customer, we’ll call him Mr. Warren for convenience sake, doesn’t he say this all the time – ‘Cut the tomato thinner next time, would you? It’s all I can taste.’ And then that next time, he says, ‘Too thin, too thin by far! I didn’t mean for you to make paper out of it.’ With a tomato slicer, Mr. Warren has nothing to complain about. Perfect every time.”

To Mary, it was as if the man was just throwing words at her, meaningless words, and yet a sense of urgency was rising somewhere at the back of her mind. Yet she resisted. “That’s something to talk to Mr. Warren about, Junior sir. Or maybe talking to Mr. Thompson would be more apt, he owns the house. I just use the tools they give me, I don’t use any of my own.”

“And that’s how you’ll never get ahead in life,” Junior said. “Only using the tools of others. Do you think it matters to these other people, how much of your life they waste? All that matters to them is that they have food on their plates. What you need to do is take control, Mary, of your own fate. You’re going to need a tomato slicer.”

“How do I get it?” she asked, reluctant but hopeful.

“That’s right, you’ve never actually ordered from the catalogue, have you? A lifelong voyeur. Thirty-seven isn’t a bad age to start, you could have many years in front of you. Fill out this paper here,” he said, and pulled out a form. He also handed her a delicate fountain pen “This is the product number, right here… Some personal information… ” And now just the matter of payment. You have three dollars?”

“I do, but it’s upstairs.”

“I’ll wait,” he said.

In a few moments, she was back with a few wadded dollar bills, and some quarters.

“Into the envelope,” he said. She folded the form around the money, and dropped it in as he held it open for her. He continued, “And I’ll do the rest. I’ll be back as soon as I can, with your new life.”

He had turned to go away, when Mary timidly asked, “Mr. Junior? It might seem strange to ask, but Mr. Warren, he says that Sears is just for all those western folk, since they’re uncivilized. And you’re all from Chicago, right? What are you doing all the way over here, in New York?”

“We go where we’re needed,” Junior responded. To emphasize his righteous statement, he adjusted the collar of his uniform with both of his hands, his leather bag hanging from his right shoulder. “Don’t let Mr. Warren convince you of things that just aren’t true.”